Wednesday, August 31, 2011

One of the first movies I featured on my blog, back in 2008, was The Holiday, starring Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, and several really great houses. But that was before I had learned how to lighten photos from movies that were too dark, or get the ones I really wanted by taking screenshots.

So I’m calling a do-over. I’m featuring the movie sets again but with more–and better!–photos for you this time.

Today I’m featuring Iris’s cottage. Next Monday I’ll feature Amanda’scontemporary home in California. Oh, and I already updated my post about Graham’s house, which you can see here (I replaced all the dark and fuzzy photos with clearer, lighter ones–makes it easier to ooh and ahh over the fairytale tent in the girls’ room now!).

This is the ad that Cameron Diaz’s character Amanda sees online for the cottage. It’s part of a “house swapping” program, where you stay free at someone else’s place while they’re at yours.

The Entry:

Living Room:

In this photo, the mantel seems to be decorated for summer:

And here you can see it decorated for Christmas:

The Kitchen:

Lovely stills of the sets courtesy Columbia Pictures. They’re wonderful because they show us details in the rooms that weren’t shown in the movie itself, like the raised beamed ceilings in the bedroom.

Looking from the Kitchen into the Book-Lined Library:

This may be my favorite room in the entire cottage, but we see very little of it in the movie:

Iris’s Bedroom:

From this angle, we can see that the stairs lead straight up to the bedroom and are open to it:

Last week we took a look at Kate Winslet’s charming cottage from The Holiday. Today we’re taking a peek inside the much more contemporary home that Cameron Diaz’s character Amanda lived in. This is a real house in Pasadena, and it happens to be one that the architect Wallace Neff built for himself in the 1920s. It has that distinctive, Mediterranean-influenced “California Style” that he became known for.

The Entry:

Another beautiful house that Wallace Neff designed was featured in Monster-in-Law (photos here.) And Reese Witherspoon owns one of them in Ojai, too, that I love(photos of her place here).

The interiors were elaborate sets built on a soundstage, which reportedly cost a cool million to construct (keep in mind, that’s without exterior walls, plumbing, a roof, or electricity!).

The movie premiered in 2006 and gave us a look at a lot of trends that would really take off in the years to follow: the color gray, seagrass rugs, and lanterns, to name a few. What other trends can you spot in these rooms?

Amanda’s Bedroom:

Bath:

Home Office:

I love how we get a tour of Amanda’s house when Iris explores it for the first time. And it’s fun to see how excited she gets about it. That would totally be me, jumping up and down and squealing.

Whereas Iris has a “book room” in her cottage, Amanda has a media room lined with every DVD imaginable. Which would you rather have?

The house looks more welcoming and at ease when Iris moves in. Even the lighting is warmer and not as harsh. The night of her dinner party is a perfect example. The house takes on a mellow kind of glow:

The Kitchen:

Rufus Sewell plays Jasper, the “bad boy” in Iris’s life who keeps breaking her heart. I’ve been a fan of his since he played Will Ladislaw in the “Middlemarch” miniseries years ago. Anyone remember that one?

Rufus and Kate actually dated each other in the ’90s. No word on whether he was this big of a jerk to her in real life or not, though.

I really thought Jack Black was miscast as Kate Winslet’s love interest in this movie at first, but he won me over by the end. The movie was reportedly written with him, Kate, Cameron, and Jude Law in mind for the roles.

We get the feeling that the kitchen was never really used much before Iris moved in.

The Living Room:

Notice how minimally Amanda has decorated for Christmas, with a simple garland on the fireplace…

One of the set decorators was Cindy Carr, who also worked on Life as We Know Itand Failure to Launch.

I personally would need more color if I lived in this house, but I thought that it suited Cameron Diaz’s uptight character perfectly. This looks like the house where someone with a need for perfection and control over her surroundings would live.

Remember how she would have those esophageal spasms whenever she got too anxious about something? Nancy Meyers says she’s had those herself, so she wrote that in for her.

For more information:

Cote de Texas has more photos and thoughts about this movie from a design point of view.

Iamnotastalker tracked the house down and has photos of how it looks today.